Accounting Academics are subject to external influences such as preparing graduates for future workplaces, bridging the gap between industry and academia and development of pathways to becoming professional accountants. Add to this the internal influences of delivery methods for student engagement, work integrated learning and casualisation of the workforce, the accounting academic is at capacity in terms of how these influences impact on workload. Using the “lived experience”, this research delves into the academic themselves to find that they categorize their workload into four themes of Teaching, Research, Accounting academic workload and development of Curricula, deemed the TRAC Framework for this study. Using this workload TRAC framework, accounting academics identified five factors they believe will influence their future roles. These include growth in international students that student success will be a shared responsibility that student engagement will be critical, that curricula design will involve stakeholder input and that expectations around research will change. These additional impact factors when added to the already at capacity workload model for accounting academics, will create a type of workload creep. This workload creep can be described as an increase in academic wear and tear, almost like depreciation on capital assets.

Change seems to be a constant feature of the 21st century workplace. Successful organisations embrace change and make sure the personnel are valued, and that they remain engaged and motivated. Employers do not require to formally be in charge of a group of people to be called leader, but demonstrating leadership is an important feature for employees at every level of an organization. Women face a diverse range of difficulties in today’s workplace, and therefore this study aims to focus on the phenomenon of leading change without formal authority and develop a model for women to bring about change within their working climate. This conceptual research aims to identify novel connections between the concepts of leadership and feminism and in consideration of the features of the 21st century workplace. Reviewing the relevant literature particularly around the leadership qualities (drive, motivation, honesty, self-confidence, cognitive ability, and knowledge of the business) this study proposes dedication, political skill and sincerity as qualities of leadership without formal authority. Since, male and female personalities appear to be different in a number of aspects, the basic five personality qualities (known as the Big Five) are reviewed: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Reviewing models of change as well as females’ qualities, this study suggests a model for leading change without formal authority including Identifying gaps, Connecting with emotions, and Committing to change (ICC model).

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With the pandemic of COVID-19 came a time of significant business disruption, particularly in relation to social distancing rules that effectively shut down organisations physical office spaces, and moved employees to Work From Home (WFH) in a very short space of time. This research looks at the current office space that employees use and compares it to the WFH space. The results showed that employees valued their physical office space, but that open plan or shared offices were often noisy and lacked privacy. Most described their office space as personal, comfortable, and conducive to productivity. In relation to the ability to work collaboratively, most respondents stated this happened in their current office space (87%), and with the move to WFH, 76% stated that they were still able to work collaboratively. Employees will no longer need to commute to work, can spend more time perusing personal plans and feel more productive when WFH. For employers, they now have access to a wider pool of talent, can enjoy cost savings and decrease their carbon footprint. The office of the future will be a hybrid model, a combination of WFH, working in the office and both, known as the Hybrid Office Model (HOM).

This research is conducted on a smart hub embedded in a business school, in a regional location, of a higher education institution. The two themes that emerged from this research are that the smart hub increased work satisfaction (theme 1) and also personal satisfaction (theme 2). The results show there are three distinctly unique factors that smart hub employees experienced by being in a business school, these included (1) external interactions with the institute's personnel (staff and students), (2) mutual benefits of engagement with smart hub employees and finally (3) the natural environment and facilities provided by the institution. Using the two themes of work and personal satisfaction, as well as the 3 unique factors, the research identified the "Unique Mutual Alliance Factors" (UMAF) to summarise the outcomes of embedding a smart hub within a higher education Business school.